ACADEMIA

NetScout Systems announced the availability of the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch, a high-performance, ultra-low latency network monitoring switch that enables enterprise IT organizations and service providers to cost-effectively aggregate, filter and distribute network traffic to the nGenius Service Assurance Solution and other monitoring, compliance and security tools. As the first announced product resulting from NetScout's acquisition of Simena, LLC, the new nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch further extends NetScout's pervasive visibility capabilities and strengthens its Unified Service Delivery Management strategy by aggregating network traffic and distributing the right packet-flow data to the right monitoring tools at the right time. Further, NetScout's entrance into the network monitoring switch market significantly changes the market landscape and empowers IT organizations to simplify and consolidate their network monitoring architecture with a single-vendor solution, thus reducing vendor complexity and leading to a lower total cost of ownership.

IT organizations are increasingly leveraging valuable packet-flow data to support a wide range of management, compliance and security monitoring activities. The fundamental role of a network monitoring switch is to share access to critical network links and efficiently distribute packet-flow data across a diverse range of tools and devices, such as performance and service management, security (IPS, DLP) and other analysis, compliance and monitoring tools, rather than requiring a separate network connection for each device. In addition, since these various monitoring and security tools typically have different requirements for the type of network traffic they receive, leveraging an intelligent network monitoring switch that can filter and condition traffic will streamline delivery and reduce the processing burden on the receiving device, thus lowering the cost of accessing the data.

"Since it was established in 2003, the traffic monitoring switching market has been standalone, requiring customers to use alternate vendors for tooling and traffic visibility. These technologies are critical for the increasing need for packet data visibility to enable better utilization and a longer life for the monitoring and security tools that are connected to them, due to their ability to deliver a subset of the total traffic in an intelligent manner," said Jonah Kowall, research director of IT Operations, Gartner. "With the new pressures to support increasing Ethernet capacities and traffic flows, Gartner expects traffic monitoring switches to be standard for many new 10 Gigabit Ethernet network architectures and we believe that it makes sense for performance management vendors to add this to their solution offerings."

Built from the same deployment-proven, low-latency switching silicon used in several high-performance data center networking platforms, the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch combines the flexibility, power, scale and intelligence needed to support the most demanding network monitoring environments. The single rack unit (1 RU) device provides up to 24-ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) with the industry's lowest sustained latency of 650 nanoseconds. Each of the 24-ports can also accommodate a 1 GbE connection through the use of small form-factor pluggable connectors (SFP), and can be dynamically configured for either incoming or outgoing traffic flows. A powerful 240 Gbps non-blocking switch fabric delivers layer 2-4 wire-speed intelligent packet filtering, port tagging and load balancing capabilities; all service options can be enabled simultaneously on each port with no performance impact.

"As we looked for a monitoring switch vendor, it was important for us to find the highest density and lowest latency 10 Gigabit connectivity in a very cost-effective form factor," said Nathan Hollinger, senior network architect at Prolexic, Inc. "After looking at several alternative network monitoring switch products, we concluded that the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch provided exactly what we were looking for with its flexibility, density and small size and was one of the lower price-per-port models available."

The nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch provides powerful aggregation and intelligent filtering capabilities to collect IP packet-flow traffic from a single network connection, or monitoring point, and distributes the flows to a diverse range of management and security tools, including nGenius InfiniStream(R) appliance and nGenius Voice l Video Engine appliance. Monitored traffic can be optimized and conditioned to deliver only the relevant data from a particular packet-flow or user session to improve end-device performance. This enables the IT organization to simplify and improve its pervasive visibility across the service delivery environment into business applications and unified communication services to understand service integrity, transaction performance and the user experience.

"As a NetScout customer and user of the nGenius Service Assurance Solution for performance management, we realized the richness of packet flow data and how having greater flexibility in sharing this same data with other tools could simplify our monitoring architecture. By adding the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch into our monitoring architecture, we can get the right data to the right tools at the right time," said Frank Ziegler, senior vice president, systems infrastructure at Miami International Holdings. "When NetScout added the nGenius switch to their product portfolio, they removed the complexities and added the efficiencies of cost and scale that come with a single-vendor approach."

"Packet-flow data has been established as a rich and definitive source of network and application intelligence for a growing number of management applications, providing a granular window into service flows, interrelationships and the user experience," said Steven Shalita, vice president, marketing at NetScout. "With the introduction of the nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch, NetScout has taken a leadership position as the first established service management vendor to offer a network monitoring switch. Consequently, enterprise and service provider organizations can now look to a single vendor for a comprehensive and cost-effective access-to-analysis solution, resulting in a more efficient and simplified design of the monitoring environment. For IT organizations, this means reducing vendor complexity and simplifying support, while minimizing additional access-layer planning, procurement, and deployment activities, thus lowering the overall total cost of ownership."

Availability

The nGenius 1500 series packet flow switch is available and shipping now. The 24-port 1 RU device offers a pay-as-you-grow configuration model where users can start with eight active ports and can activate additional ports in increments of four. Up to two devices can be clustered and managed as one switch and all advanced services and features are included as standard with no incremental costs. Contact NetScout or a NetScout authorized reseller for more information.